I recently had to send my laptopto Sony for a repair. Prior to doing this, I wisely backed up the hard drive using Nero BackItUp 2 to an external HD (WD 500GB,USB2). My computer came back with a new hard drive (although I don't understand why, as the old one was fine). So I reinstall Nero, and try to restore, and I get a message that I have to boot from the CD that nero creates (essentially a linux boot CD with the restore software in place). Every time I try, I get an error message: "The program has performedd an illegal memory access and will be shut down." I have also tried through windows using both drives as external drives (on a 2nd computer), but nero does not allow for restoring to an "active" drive.
Nero's documentation is mighty sparse on the subject.
Anticipating a potential problem I alsodid a complete backup of the entire file tree, so in the worst case scenario I just reinstallallsoftware and settings and replace all documents, but this is certainly a pain and time consuming.I would much rather setit to restore while I sleep and be done with it.
Thanks for the help.

Did you do a Hard Drive backup, or did you use the 'File Backup' feature? I need to know this to properly assist you in doing the restore.

Basd on your error message, "The program has performedd an illegal memory access and will be shut down", I must assume that you did a File Backup and you are attempting to restore from within Windows. This would normally not be a problem, unless you backed up the Windows System folder, in which case you can not restore while running Windows as a number of files are in use that can not be overwritten. That would require you to boot to a Nero Bootable CD/DVD to run the restore from the Bootable Linux CD/DVD.

Could you provide more details about the exact steps you used to create the back, and then the exact steps you used in attempting to do the restore?